From Inglewood to the skies above, a ground-breaking mission is underway to understand how long life can survive in space.
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Scientists from La Trobe University in Bendigo launched fungi to a height of around 80,000 feet to test their survival against UV, radiation and temperatures worse than Mars on Friday, April 12.
The launch was the latest in the university's High-Altitude Advanced-Materials and Engineering Research (HAAMER) project, in collaboration with RMIT University.
The project sees the "most hearty organisms known to science" - known as Archaea - blasted to extreme heights to see if organisms from other planets can survive entry into earth.
Idea borrowed from NASA
La Trobe Engineering Professor James Maxwell said inspiration for the launch came after NASA discovered rocks on Earth from Mars thought to contain fossil life.
"And this has spawned some questions like, 'can life get transported from one planet to another? or even from one solar system to another?'," Professor Maxwell said.
Fungi, one of the earliest lifeforms, were a good starting point to answer those questions, he said.
"They are extremophiles which are life forms that can stand withstand extreme heat and extreme cold," he said.
Those characteristics would come in handy once the fungi were airborne, Mr Maxwell said.
"They get frozen, they get desiccated because it is really dry ... and the air pressure drops on them until there's almost no oxygen."
Check for meteorites in your gutters
The capsule, attached to a four-metre wide balloon, was blasted off from a farm in Inglewood before being recovered nearby Shepparton later that day.
The lifeforms which had inspired the project were not restricted to NASA and rocket science, with similar meteorites discoverable in Bendigo roofs, the professor said.
"If you have a rain gutter and with a magnet and you run it along your gutter you're gonna pick up probably several little micro meteorites," Professor Maxwell said.
"They are tiny ... a millimetre or smaller, but they rain down from space all the time and they could contain forms inside.
The fungi launched on April 12 were still being tested to see if they had survived the launch, though previous experiments through the HAAMER project had been unsuccessful.
